My Way, Or No Way!
Here's a fun little exercise. Get a sheet of paper and make a list of people you know who exhibit the "my way, or no way" attitude. When you've done, you can write the title Self-Righteous Pricks above the list, and stick it up on your wall (and throw darts at it?). If you've included women on your list, don't worry, having a penis is not a requirement for behaving like a prick.
Okay. So it wasn't really much fun at all, and if your list is anything like mine then one sheet of paper is not enough. But perhaps the interesting part is thinking about other people's lists. Do I feature in any of them? Do you? Do I feature in your list! Do you feature on mine?
I'll come clean. I didn't actually write a list so you can be fairly certain you're not on it. My list exists in conveyor belt form. When I come across someone who meets the criteria - holier-than-thou, self-important, condescending, prick - I put them on my imaginary conveyor belt, and watch them disappear off the end where they fall into the great oblivion.
I suspect that Sid Vicious probably falls into the self-righteous prick category for some people. But it's neither here nor there because he fell off the end of life's conveyor belt quite a while back, possibly because he was curious enough to go see what was over the edge.
In one of those chains of thought which take you somewhere you didn't expect to go, I ended up thinking about Sid after doing my usual in-the-car-in-the-church-car-park routine this morning. It started off with Knockin' On Heaven's Door (Bob Dylan's original version) as the first song to be randomly played by my music player.
If you don't mind, we'll skip the discussion about why I like the song even though I am about as convinced as it's possible to be that there is no door to knock on. Maybe another time. The thing was that I featured covers of that song in a previous post, so I didn't want to include it in this post.
As coincidence would have it, the Guns N' Roses version came up a few songs later, which is probably my favourite version because their treatment of it is, what shall I say, sacrilegious? Later in the day I had the misfortune to pass by a karaoke party (you know the sort of thing - people who are really quite bad at singing amplifying their efforts to such a degree that nobody within several miles can have any doubt about how bad they are), and, to my horror, the miscreant of the moment was singing My Way.
And that's how I got to thinking about Mr Vicious. Here he is doing his memorable version of that 'classic'. Now that's sacrilegious!
